What is it about?
This article describes an investigational text analysis of suspicious, spam e-mails directed at an industrial, non-academic researcher in the healthcare field, with the goal of creating a simple guide for recognizing predatory patterns. Predatory actors in the scientific community use e-mails as traps to lure inexperienced scientists and young researchers into fraudulent schemes, potentially ruining their reputation and career prospects. The methodology involved: Screening the researcher's e-mail for spam messages of a scientific nature (e.g., invitations for manuscript submission, conference attendance, or board invitations). Analyzing the text using the Meaning Cloud Add-in for text classification, topic extraction, and sentiment analysis. Further investigating the datasets using Pareto charting (Pareto principle) to prioritize the most frequent characteristics. Key findings from the analysis of 187 messages indicated: Subjectivity: The messages were largely subjective (81.8%). Content Labels: The most common text body labels were "Arts and entertainment>Books and literature" (41.2%) and "Technology and computing>Email" (32.6%). Polarity: An overwhelming majority (85.6%) demonstrated a positive polarity (P). Topic Categories: "Entity" (names, locations, institutions) and "Concept" accounted for over 85% of the extracted categories. Keywords/Cluster Size: The most contributing keywords by about 70% were science-related terms such as "Journal," "Article," "Submission," and "Research".
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Why is it important?
This study is important because it provides a simple, straightforward, and inexpensive guide to help vulnerable researchers, especially those in the non-academic sector who may lack clear guidance, to recognize the patterns of predatory scientific e-mails. The importance of the work is highlighted by the following points: Growing Problem: Predatory activity is a progressively growing challenge that negatively impacts the integrity of the scientific community. Vulnerability: Young and inexperienced scientists often do not encounter guidelines on avoiding predatory journals/conferences until it is too late. Practical Tool: By analyzing the text of suspicious e-mails using commercial and easy-to-use tools like Meaning Cloud and Excel/Minitab (for Pareto charting), the study helps researchers spot the common keywords and characteristics of these messages. Risk Mitigation: Understanding the predatory pattern and behavior can help researchers avoid actions that could ruin their careers and efforts and lead to the defamation of their scientific reputation.
Perspectives
The article's findings offer several perspectives on the nature of scientific predation: Psychological Manipulation: The use of positive sentiment (85.6% positive polarity) and encouraging language is a deliberate attempt by senders to manipulate the emotions of "desperate victims" to drag them into involvement actions. This fostering sentiment is coupled with a "mirage of enjoyable benefits" and false professionalism. Lack of Scientific Essence: Despite hiding under the "general scope of science" , the messages often demonstrate an apparent unprofessionalism and a lack of scientific essence that can be "sensed between the lines". This is also seen in the "reckless behavior" of including unrelated fields of research in the text body. Focus on Immediate Action: The content frequently focuses on terms related to publishing and deadlines (e.g., Journal, Article, Submission, Time expression) , encouraging authors to deliver their work fast. Interestingly, "money expressions" were the least obvious in the analysis, suggesting financial attraction is often hidden or secondary in the initial contact. Evolving Threat/Legal Vacuum: The study notes that predatory senders are likely to "evolve themselves to gimmick the victims," but the basic concepts of detection should remain the same. Crucially, the authors note there are no signs of mitigation or serious legal actions being proposed to stop this "noxious misconduct," which has made predators more bold. The immediate hope, therefore, lies in protecting vulnerable populations through increased awareness.
Independent Researcher & Consultant Mostafa Essam Eissa
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Time-Bound Investigational Text Analysis of Predatory E-mails Using Pareto Principle, Trends in Scholarly Publishing, January 2023, The Asian Council of Science Editors,
DOI: 10.21124/tsp.2023.1.8.
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